Merry-go-round

If you liked Power Tower from Goh Pit Khiam and Jack Krijnen, then you’re going to love Merry-go-round from the same duo…

A couple of months ago I had an email arrive in my inbox from Jack with a picture of a Merry-go-round and an invitation to express an interest – now, dear reader, this will probably surprise you, but I expressed a lot of interest, immediately… in the name of research, of course. 

Jack duly came back and asked me what combination of pieces I wanted – apparently there isn’t a standard set, you get to make it up as you please… so we traded a few emails and he pointed out the folly of some of my ways and made some really helpful suggestions, and a few weeks later a neat little box of bits arrived in Barnt Green. 

Now, when you’re playing, Merry-go-round looks like a slimmed down version of the Power Tower, with a square central post and bumpy arms radiating outward – the post forces the arms to interact and depending on the number of bumps they have, they’ll produce binary, ternary, quaternary etc. movements. This design allows combinations of pretty much any n-ary-ness (see what I did there?) with as many arms as you like, up to the natural maximum for each post, of course…  

The top arm is a binary slider and then each arm below it can have any selected n-ary-ness – each successive arm can move one space when the arm above it has moved from one end to the other… repeat until done. 

Given my selection of arm lengths, Jack had suggested a pair of central posts with 4 and 6 slots respectively and I’m rather glad he did! (You’ll work out why later…) My sets of sticks came in two lengths and a selection of -aries. The shorter sticks start at ternary and work up to quinary – and there’s enough of those to fill the taller post (with the binary stick) and then there’s the longer set of sticks… that go from senary to septenary and novenary (or 6-, 7- and 9-ary if, like me, you needed to look that up!).  I know, that was a little silly of me…

Sometime before Christmas I duly loaded them up and set about assembling them – cunningly using the longer sticks in the short 4-slot post (Thanks Jack!) – significantly reducing the number of moves to complete the solutions…

After a few plays with them, and mixing and matching the bases to confuse myself (quite successfully!), I set about modelling them in BurrTools… and I have now established that with my sticks I can create puzzles using the 4-slot post with from as low as 22 moves (using some of the pieces backwards!), up to 1318 moves(!). The 6-slot post raises that to a rather heady 48948 – I am eternally grateful for Jack talking me into getting the 4-slot post, or else those longer sticks would hardly ever see any action at all…

Definitely the go-to-puzzle if you need a few hours (or more!) of n-ary therapy!